Breaking

Bat-Killing Fungal Disease Has U.S. Lumber Firms Fighting States

A file photo shows a brown bat with White Nose Syndrome hanging in the Greeley Mine in Vermont, during March 2009. Source: U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service via Bloomberg

March 11 (Bloomberg) -- Greg Turner hoisted himself up with
a rope from an unlighted 20-foot pit in an abandoned mine in
Durham, Pennsylvania. His task of counting bats didn’t take long
-- just seven where five years ago there were 4,000.

“There’s nobody home, basically, at this point,” said
Turner, an endangered-mammal specialist at the Pennsylvania Game
Commission. The agency wants to set up bat protections that
threaten human livelihoods, say the state’s leading business
lobby and lumber industry, which accounts for about 5 percent of
U.S. jobs in that field.

A flesh-eating disease called white-nose syndrome has
killed more than 5.7 million bats in the eastern U.S. and Canada
since its discovery in a New York cave in 2006. Pennsylvania has
had the most precipitous decline, according to Bat Conservation
International. The game commission, which manages wildlife and
habitats, has proposed placing three species on the state’s
endangered list, as was done in Wisconsin and Vermont.

The Pennsylvania Forest Products Association, based in
Harrisburg, says a listing might lead to a ban on tree removals,
making it nearly impossible for businesses to recover from the
18-month recession that ended in 2009. The association
represents companies such as Montreal-based Domtar Corp. and
Temple Inland, a division of Memphis, Tennessee-based
International Paper.

Commission officials say any restrictions would be the
result of compromise.

Famous Darter

“Pennsylvania has the most controversy,” said Mylea
Bayless, director of conservation programs at Bat Conservation
International, a research group in Austin, Texas. “It is the
latest example that people perceive that economics is going to
be in conflict with conservation.”

The need to preserve animals has conflicted with the needs
of humans -- and business -- for decades. Efforts to protect the
Santa Ana sucker fish in California, the Jollyville Plateau
salamanders in Texas and the snail darter, a perch-like fish
that delayed the construction of the Tellico Dam in the Little
Tennessee River in 1973, all set off similar discord.

Pennsylvania’s bats are threatened by white-nose syndrome,
caused by a fungus that penetrates their skin, rousing them
during hibernation, depleting fat reserves and killing them by
starving or freezing. The disease has spread as far west as
Missouri. When infected, colonies decline by 95 percent within
two to three years, said the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,
which calls such mortality unprecedented.

Bat Plague

“It’s the most devastating wildlife disease that we know
of that has ever hit North America,” said Cal Butchkoski,
supervisor of the mammal section of Pennsylvania’s wildlife
diversity program.

The disease, for which there’s no known cure, was first
spotted in the Keystone State in December 2008, and massive
deaths began the next winter. There has been a near
annihilation: Since 2008, surveys have shown a 99 percent drop
in northern long-eared bats and little brown bats and 98 percent
decline in tricolored bats, according to the commission.

This throws the ecosystem off balance, as every 1 million
bats eat 700 tons of insects a year, according to Bat
Conservation International. The deaths in North America could
mean at least $3.7 billion in agricultural losses annually,
according to an analysis by biologists published in Science
magazine in 2011.

Empty Mine

At Durham Mine, once Pennsylvania’s second-biggest habitat
for hibernating bats, about 10,000 were counted in 1997,
according to the Heritage Conservancy, a Doylestown-based
nonprofit that owns it. Two years ago, surveyors found 180,
Turner said. He counted just 23 during his Feb. 21 trip.

By placing three species on Pennsylvania’s endangered list,
the commission could monitor survivors and protect winter cave
habitats and summer forest shelters, Butchkoski said. In April,
the commission will hold a hearing on the matter.

“These are the animals that we don’t want to put more
stresses on,” he said. “These are the ones that we want to
survive and work with in recovery.”

Developers and businesses would check a website to see
which areas host bats, and if any restrictions, such as
requirements to provide buffers around caves during mating
season, are in place. The protections would be less stringent
than a federal listing, which can have measures such as months-long ban on tree removal, Butchkoski said.

Still, state restrictions could be modified through
discussions or set aside if a business agrees to offset any loss
of habitat, he said.

Protections for the federally endangered Indiana bat
include a ban on tree removals near hibernation areas from April
to mid-November. If such a measure were in place for other
species, a majority of the state would be off limits most of the
year, he said.

“There’s not really a lot of time for loggers to practice
their professions, or sawmills or paper companies to be able to
access the materials to stay in business,” he said.

The industry is still trying to recover from the recession,
he said. Pennsylvania is the country’s top producer of hardwood
lumber, and in 2012 had $1.2 billion in total hardwood exports,
which includes lumber, logs and furniture, said Will Nichols, a
spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture.
Forestry companies employ 53,021 people, according to state
data.

Protective Power

The Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry, a
Harrisburg-based group, sent the commission a letter questioning
its power to enforce protections of bats.

Legislators may have some oversight over the game
commission’s actions, said Representative Ron Miller, a
Republican who is chairman of the environmental resources and
energy committee.

“I don’t quite understand what you gain by putting them on
the endangered species list if it’s a disease within the
colony,” Miller said. “But I’m willing to hear what the
scientists and everybody have to say. Certainly we want to know
what the impact is.”